“The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language,” explains Google Webmaster Trends analyst Pierre Far. “Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.”

“The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited,” says Far. “For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.”

If example.com/en-gb targets English-speaking users in the UK, example.com/en-us targets English-speaking users in the US, example.com/en-au targets English-speaking users in Australia, and exmaple.com/ tshows users a country selector and is the default page worldwide, then the annotation would something like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" /> 

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" /> 

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" /> 

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

The annotation can also be used for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on users’ geolocation or the Accept-Language headers.

The cheat sheet is a single page, “short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design, that can help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility.”

And it’s available in 13 languages.

“We hope this content will help those who are just about to start their webmaster adventure or have so far not paid too much attention to search engine-friendly design,” says Google.

You can grab the pdf today.

Possibilities include: domain name provider, HTML file upload, HTML meta tag and Google Analytics.

“Verifying ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools provides you and Google a secure channel for giving and receiving information,” says Ohye. “For example, Google can show you more confidential information, such as the search queries that bring visitors to your site, and by verifying ownership, you’ll have privileges to do things like adjust targeting settings to associate your site with the audience of a particular country.”

“Verification doesn’t affect your site’s performance in Google search results,” she notes.

Google wants to provide a good experience to users, and users will not benefit from a site that doesn’t cater to the device they are using, even if the content is there. Google recognizes this, and it seems fairly likely that they will take measures to keep your site from showing up if it’s not optimized. Maybe not your site specifically, but this seems like they kind of thing they’d want to improve upon algorithmically.

Google suggests using responsive design as a way to ensure that your site looks good across devices. They don’t say it will actually help you in search rankings, but considering Googe’s emphasis on user experience, and the fact that they’re even suggesting it, seems to indicate that this is something they’re paying attention to.

Google has talked about this a number of times in the past. Here are some steps they provided earlier this year, for example. The next month, they shared more advice. Now, they’re talking about making sure you give tablet users the full-sized web, emphasizing that you should not be showing these users a mobile-specific site.

“When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect, say Google’s Pierre Far and Scott Main in a joint blog post. “Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.”

“Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices,” they write. “If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.”

They also note that another approach is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and just to redirect users to the relevant version. Just make sure you’re sending tablet users to the desktop version.

Still, tablets are coming in a variety of sizes these days. Some of them are getting quite small. Responsive design might be the best bet.

The two note that they “do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites.”

Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, put out a new Webmaster Help video discussing reconsideration requests and whether or not they’re actually read by humans. The video was a response to the following user-submitted question:

Right now, when a webmaster sends a reconsideration request, how many chances does it have to be read by a real human? Do you plan to make it possible for webmasters to answer when they get a result back from Google?

“Whenever you do a reconsideration request, if you don’t have any manual action by the webspam team, so there’s no way we could do anything, in essence, because it’s algorithmically determining where you’re ranking, those are automatically closed out,” says Cutts. “Those aren’t looked at by a human being, but 100% of all the other reconsideration requests are looked at by a real person.”

“We don’t have the time to individually reply with a ton of detail, and so we do think about ways to be more scalable, and so I understand it might not be as satisfying to get, ‘Yeah, we think you’re okay,’ or ‘No, you still have issues,’ but that is a real human that is looking at that and generating the response that you read back,” he says.

He goes on to say that if Google still thinks you have issues with your site, you should take the time to investigate and figure out some things you can do before submitting another request. If you just submit it again without doing anything, Google will likely consider you to be “hard headed” and find it “unproductive to continue that conversation.”

“We’ve actually been trying a very experimental program where when we see someone who’s done a reconsideration request more than once, we’ll sample a small number of those and send those to other people to sort of say, ‘Okay, let’s do a deeper dig here.’ You know, maybe we need to send a little bit more info or investigate in a little bit more detail,” continues Cutts. “It’s just one of the ways we’ve been experimenting. We’ve actually been doing it for quite a while to try to figure out, ‘Okay, are there other ways that we can improve our process? Other ways that we can communicate more?’ So it’s the kind of thing where we don’t guarantee that if you appeal a couple times that you’ll get any sort of more detailed of an answer, but there are people reading all those reconsideration requests.”

It’s understandable, as webmasters have been waiting months for the tool to be released, but Danny Sullivan points out another piece of significance from Cutts’ speech. Google now claims to be sending out messages to webmasters for pretty much every manual action it takes on a site. Sullivan reports:

“We’ve actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site,” said Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, when speaking at the Pubcon conference this week.

Cutts said there might be a rare “corner case” that might not make it but that reporting is “practically 100%” and “the intent is to get to 100%, and as far as I know, we’re actually there.”

It’s been quite obvious that Google has been sending out many more messages this year than they have historically, but this is good information for webmasters to know, especially since certain activities that are in violation of Google’s quality guidelines could really either be hit by a manual action or an algorithmic action, particularly since Penguin launched.

I suppose this is all part of Google’s effort to be more transparent, which has also included semi-monthly lists of algorithm changes and more tweeting about major updates in recent weeks.

“Internet Marketing Ninjas, led by company founder Jim Boykin, is the ideal match for WebmasterWorld,” said Tabke. “I couldn’t have asked for a better situation than a long-time member acquiring WebmasterWorld.”

WebmasterWorld is just the latest in a series of forums Boykin has acquired. Other recent pick-ups include Cre8asiteforums, and the Developer Shed Network.

“2012 has been a major year for IMN and I feel privileged to be a part of WebmasterWorld,” says Boykin. “I’ve been a member of WMW for over 10 years, and I’ve learned so much from so many there. I have so much respect for the community members and it gives me the uttermost pride to be able to work with the community to move WMW into the future. I am very humbled and ready to listen to, and work with, this amazing community.”

WebmasterWorld Director of Operations, Neil Marshall, offered the following statement: “I’m delighted to be involved with Jim and his team at Internet Marketing Ninjas. This is an exciting new era for WebmasterWorld and I’m really looking forward to continuing to develop the site for the benefit of its members, and retaining the site’s world-renowned, quality discussion forum for webmasters and their businesses. Thank you to Brett Tabke, for giving webmasters an independent vehicle to meet and to discuss current hot topics, turning the site into a major brand for webmasters. I’m sure the whole team is ready to keep that going forward and to develop new ideas for today’s Internet marketing businesses.”

WebmasterWorld is a place where there is a great deal of discussion from webmasters dealing with Google various algorithm updates. Such discussions often give clues to new major algorithm changes that Google makes before they are officially announced (although there is often a lot of talk that leads to false alarms).

It will be interesting to see how the forum evolves under new ownership. From the sound of it, the community itself won’t be changing much.

Tabke says he intends to invest his future efforts into the PubCon conferences.

You can see plenty more details about it here (along with a video from Matt Cutts).

One important thing to note about the tool, however, is that just because you do tell Google to ignore certain links, it is not a 100% guarantee that they will do so. It’s more of a suggestion, and Google will still decide whether or not it wants to follow your instructions.

In a Q&A section in the official blog post announcing the tool, Google says:

This tool allows you to indicate to Google which links you would like to disavow, and Google will typically ignore those links. Much like with rel=”canonical”, this is a strong suggestion rather than a directive—Google reserves the right to trust our own judgment for corner cases, for example—but we will typically use that indication from you when we assess links.

Emphasis added.

It probably won’t be an issue if you’re using the tool the way it was intended to be used, but it’s something to be aware of.

Google also says the new design makes it clearer what structured data Google can extract from the page (and how it may be shown in search results). It’s also now available in languages other than English.

The tool works with all supported rich snippets, as well as authorship markup, at least in theory.

Former Googler Vanessa Fox, who built Webmaster Central, writes, “I’m having a bit of trouble with the tool. For instance, looking at the page they show in the blog post: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-banana-bread/, the rich snippet appears in the tool correctly…However, the image is missing for this page in the actual search results. Why isn’t the image showing up?”

You can access the tool here.

Last month, Google introduced the Structured Data Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools. More on that here.

Sexton removed his post, but in the comments of the following Google+ post about the post (via Search Engine Roundtable), someone posted a link to a screen cap of her account of the guidelines.

Eren Mckay21 hours ago

Official Google Webmaster Guidelines gets updated
thanks to +David Harry  for sharing:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 here's a post about it too:
http://www.feedthebot.com/blog/official-google-guidelines-get-updated/

---

Official Google Guidelines Updated – Webmaster Advice
update: I have confirmed with two Google employees that these new guidelines were put up by mistake and were not meant to go public yet. I just happened to notice them and I naturally wrote about them… 10    15 Powered by socialditto

(Click the timestamp to go to the comment thread.)

Google must have had some reason to pull the guidelines, so it’s hard to say how much of what Sexton spotted is what Google will end up going with. The webmaster guidelines are obviously important, however, in ensuring that a site stays in Google’s good graces and doesn’t face getting penalized or hit by algorithm changes designed to enforce the guidelines. The Penguin update was geared towards enforcing the quality guidelines specifically (part of the Webmaster Guidelines).

According to the screen cap of Sexton’s post, there is some new stuff about rich snippets, which are not currently mentioned on the Webmaster Guidelines page at all.

There are things like, “Review our recommended best practices for images, video and rich snippets,” and “Avoid abusing rich snippets markup.”

Things to avoid include: automatically generated content, participating in link schemes, cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text/links, doorway pages, scraped content, participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value, loading pages with irrelevant keywords, creating pages with malicious behavior (such as phishing or installing viruses, torjans or other badware,” abusing rich snippets markup and sending automated queries to Google.

It says to “engage in good practices” like: monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears, preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site.

Some other quotes from the post:

“Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.”

“Don’t deceive your users.”

“Avoid scraped content.”

“Avoid automatically generated content.”

“Monitor your site for hacking and remove hacked content as soon as it appears.”

“Prevent and remove user-generated spam on your site.”

This is all pretty basic and common sense stuff, but that’s essentially what the guidelines are are about, for the most part, anyway.

I guess we’ll see if the changes are implemented soon, and whether Google has even more to add.